Four Finalists for MCHAP Emerging Architecture award to present at Crown Hall Tuesday, winner to be announced that evening

UPDATE [5/22/14]  Pezo Von Ellrichshausen has won the inaugural MCHAP for Emerging Architecture,  for Casa Poli on Chile's Coliumo peninsula.

A benefit dinner this Tuesday, May 20th, will see the announcement of the inaugural winner of the new Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Architecture “awarded to an outstanding built work in the Americas by an emerging practice completed within the preceding two years.”  The prize comes with $25,000 cash and an IIT professorship for the coming year.

The 47 submissions, which included Jeanne Gang's Aqua, have been whittled down to four finalists.  This Tuesday afternoon from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., each of those finalists will be in Crown Hall presenting their projects, followed by Vedram Mimica leading a round-table debate with the architects plus Phyllis Lambert, Sarah Whiting, Wiel Arets, Dirk Denison, MCHAP Nominators Robert McCarter, Franco Micucci, Susan Conger-Austin, Marshall Brown, Sean Keller, and the audience.

The four finalists include . . .

photograph: Cristobal Palma - click images for larger view

The Kiltro House in Talca, Pencahue, Chile, by Juan Pablo Corvalan/Susuka/Supersudaca

photgraph: Oliver Hess

Maximilian’s Schell in Los Angeles by Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues

photograph: James Brittain

 OMS Stage in Winnipeg, Manitoba, by 5468796 Architecture

photograph: Cristobal Palma

and Poli House in Tome, Bio-Bio Region, Chile, by Pezo von Ellrichshausen.

The Emerging Architecture award is the warm-up for the main event, the MCHAP Award, for which there is 225 nominees (pictured here) of “built works, completed between January 2000 and December 2013 . . . within the North and South American continents.”

Mansueto Library

The list is a who's-who usual suspects of big profile projects, again including Jeanne Gang's Aqua, as well as Gang's WMS Boathouse at Clark Park,  Helmut Jahn's Mansueto Library, Rem Koolhaas's IIT McCormick Tribune Campus Center, Renzo Piano's Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, Zoka Zola's Pfanner House, John Ronan's Poetry Foundation and Gary Comer Youth Center, Perkins+will's Rush University Medical Tower, David Hovey's Sterling Ridge, and - in an act of supreme irony - Tod Williams/Billie Tsien Architects' 2001 American Folk Art Museum, which the Museum of Modern Art is currently in the process of demolishing.

Rush University Medical Tower

The MCHAP Award “will laud those built works that recognize the altered circumstances of the human condition. It will honor those projects that consider how we might elevate the quality of our built environments by extending our interests beyond the proverbial four walls. It will endorse those who acknowledge the interdisciplinary nature of our new ventures. Above all, it will recognize those who have invested their work with the mystery and power of human imagination. The objective is to reward the daring contemplation of the intersection of the new metropolis and human ecology.”

The Americas Prize comes with a $50,000 cash award, a year as MCHAP Chair at the IIT School of Architecture, and a perpetually re-stocked bowl of blue-only M&M's.  The winner  is scheduled to be announced this fall.

The anti-Pritzker? Wiel Arets Gets IIT into the Architecture Awards Game: $50,000 Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize to be announced today

I think Mies was a great thinker and a master in scale. He was someone who under- stood that there has to be a distance between us and a building, just as there is a distance between us and nature. Today this is dwindling. When you read Mies’s texts, they were short and precise, and that makes him a model for all of us. Mies knew what architecture was about, and he knew how the architectural product was part of our landscape, environment, and world. It would be great to announce at this very place, in 2015, the first North American architect, and emerging architect, to receive the Mies Crown Hall North America Prize; to establish this prize would be a challenge and a stimulating event for the global architectural discourse.

That was Dean of IIT College of Architecture Wiel Arets talking early last year in NOWNESS, the publication reflecting how “Arets is leading the movement of the COA toward ‘nowness’ - a multifaceted approach to the discipline of architecture and the embracing of urbanism in the world's metropolises.”

Less than a year later, a major piece of the campaign is falling into place.  Today at 1:00 p.m., from CCA Montréal, there will be an announcement - streamed live - of the establishing of the biannual Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, which has its own website here.

The Americas Prize will laud those built works that recognize the altered circumstances of the human condition. It will honor those projects that consider how we might elevate the quality of our built environments by extending our interests beyond the proverbial four walls. It will endorse those who acknowledge the interdisciplinary nature of our new ventures. Above all, it will recognize those who have invested their work with the mystery and power of human imagination. The objective is to reward the daring contemplation of the intersection of the new metropolis and human ecology.

The $50,000 Americas Prize will honor “the best architectural work in the Americas completed in the preceding two years. ” It will come with ”the MCHAP Chair at Illinois Insitute of Technology’ for a year, where the winners will give a public lecture and  “establish research related to the theme of “rethinking the metropolis’.”   The work will be featured in a MCHAP Book, along that of finalists and other projects the jury may choice to recognize.   Last December, the COA was posting open positions for both a Director of Publishing and a MCHAP Co-ordinator.  The Americas Prize Director will serve as a non-voting member of the five-person jury.

There will be a benefits dinner this spring, with the awards ceremony scheduled for this October.  More information - and, presumably, a link to this afternoon's noon CDT live stream  - here.

Previously:

The World of Wiel Arets lands at IIT.  Read here.